In this election, both the Religious Right and the secular Left were defeated, and the voice of the moral center was heard.

Wow. That's quite an assertion. I thought to myself: 'Finally, Wallis is going to help me to understand exactly who and what this mysterious and influential movement really is: the secular left that he seems to equate in significance to the Religious Right -- which is certainly one of the the largest and most influential political and social movements in a century.'

Alas, my hopes were dashed. Wallis did not bother to support his thesis or define his terms. He not only failed to show how the secular left was defeated, he did not even bother to demonstrate that it exists -- or if it does, how it was an actor in the current elections it allegedly lost.

Secular bashing is an old tradition on the religious right, as Chip Berlet recounted here at Talk to Action:

The idea that a coordinated campaign by "secular humanists" was aimed at displacing Christianity as the moral bedrock of America actually traces back to a group of Catholic ideologues in the 1960s. It was Protestant evangelicals, especially fundamentalists, who brought this concept into the public political arena and developed a plan to mobilize grassroots activists as foot soldiers in what became known as the Culture Wars of the 1980s.

A popular theologian named Francis A. Schaeffer caught the attention of many Protestants in a series of books and essays calling on Christians to directly confront sinful and decadent secular culture with its humanist values...

[Evangelical scholar] George Marsden argues that this new focus on secular humanism "revitalized fundamentalist conspiracy theory"... Two leading activists of the Christian right, Gary Bauer and James Dobson, called the battle pitting secular humanists against Christians over the moral foundation of America a "great Civil War of Values".

The idea of a conscious and coordinated conspiracy of secular humanists has been propounded in various ways by a variety of national conservative organizations, including the Christian Coalition (Pat Robertson), the Eagle Forum (Phyllis Schlafly), Concerned Women for America (Beverly LaHaye), American Coalition for Traditional Values (Tim LaHaye), Christian Anti-Communism Crusade (Fred Schwarz), and the John Birch Society (Robert Welch).

By framing this set of claims as a conspiracy to provoke a "Culture War," conservative Christians transform political disagreements into a battle between the Godly and the Godless, between good and evil, and ultimately between those that side with God and those that wittingly or unwittingly side with Satan.

Perhaps Wallis, Obama and others are just unwittingly aping the slogans of the religious right and their allies over the past few decades. Perhaps they are doing something else. But whatever it is, as I wrote earlier this year:

Mindless secular bashing only gives strength to the religious right, and divides progressives and democrats against themselves.

Meanwhile, as Moiv has reported here at Talk to Action, Wallis also attended a high-level antiabortion conference some years ago and signed onto a joint  statement with the likes of James Dobson, Ralph Reed and Fr. Frank Pavone.

As much as I appreciate Wallis' opposition to war and concern for the poor and wider issues of social justice, his adoption of the false, Manichean frame of the religious right, (invented as part of a wide-ranging attack on religious pluralism and separation of church and state), is disturbing, as is his antiabortion alliance with top leaders of the religious right.

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